October 29, 2011: A private security contractor and former soldier from Canada admitted he helped Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saadi flee Libya in September as Tripoli was falling to anti-Gaddafi rebels.

Gary Peters, president of Can/Aus Security & Investigations International Inc. in Cambridge, Ont., was also Saadi Gaddafi’s longtime bodyguard and admitted he was part of a team that drove the late dictator’s third son across Libya’s southern border to Niger.

The convoy was ambushed after it had crossed back into Libya and Mr. Peters was shot. He returned to Toronto’s Pearson airport in September, bleeding heavily from an untreated bullet wound to his left shoulder.

November 29, 2011: During the final weeks of the anti-Gaddafi revolution in Libya, an Ontario consultant who specializes in mediating First Nations disputes assembled a small team to travel to Tripoli for a 10-day, fact-finding mission.

Cynthia Vanier of Vanier Consulting hired a private jet from Veritas Worldwide Security, a San Diego-based company that advertises, among other services, “clandestine operations,” “armed combat” and provision of weapons.

While Ms. Vanier has declined to disclose who paid for the dangerous and costly expedition (Veritas said its contract alone was worth more than US$80,000), the National Post has learned SNC-Lavalin hired the firm, although the company said it was unaware Gary Peters, a former Australian soldier from Ontario who was working as a bodyguard for the Gaddafi family, was involved.

The report of a privately-funded Canadian fact-finding mission that traveled to Libya last summer as Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was clinging to power was one-sided and reflected a view of the conflict that the regime was actively promoting, according to those familiar with its contents.

The Vanier Consulting study was impartially titled “Fact Finding Report — Mission Date July 17, 2011-July 26, 2011,” but several people who have seen it called it pro-Gaddafi and said it claimed NATO forces and Libyan rebels had committed atrocities and war crimes.

December 7, 2011: After Libyans turned against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in February, his playboy son Saadi made plans to flee to a Mexican beach resort whose celebrity visitors include Kim Kardashian, Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga.

Although the United Nations had frozen Saadi Gaddafi’s assets and banned him from crossing borders because of his close ties to the Libyan dictatorship, a multi-million-dollar refuge awaited him in Punta Mita, a posh development near Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

To get him there, a Canadian company, Can/Aust Security and Investigations International, approached private security contractors in Ontario, offering $1,000-a-day to join the team that would pick up the 38-year-old Gaddafi and fly him, his wife and children out of Libya.

December 7, 2011: The Montreal engineering and construction company SNC-Lavalin footed the bill for Saadi Gaddafi’s private security team when the Libyan dictator’s son spent three months in Canada in 2008.

December 8, 2011: After a career of working in First Nations communities such as Ipperwash and Attawapiskat, mediating conflicts over land and resources, Cynthia Vanier ventured overseas last summer and waded into the conflict in Libya.

“She’s very kind,” said Mahmod Razwan, a Libyan-Canadian who accompanied her on her visit to wartime Tripoli. “She cries when she sees certain people getting hurt and she’s really genuine when she talks to people.”

But on Wednesday, Mexican authorities offered a less humanitarian view of Ms. Vanier, naming her as the suspected ringleader of a plot to smuggle Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s playboy son Saadi to Mexico using fraudulent travel documents.